DeSantis’ Presidential Campaign Has A Problem. The Florida Legislature

I can’t stop laughing here. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is desperately running around, trying to present himself as the alternative to Trump, Trump without the baggage. And it’s not working out so well.

Because every time he turns around, The Piss Ant keeps having the Florida hard right legislature step all over his moves. And yet his own legislature is throwing more American Tourists on his head than a Pullman porter at a train station.

If you’re trying to represent yourself as a calm, steely eyed, centered Governor that can get things done, the last thing you need is friction. And right now, DeSantis is making more friction than a kid rubbing his stockinged feet on the carpet before touching a metal surface.

The first problem is purely a self inflicted gunshot wound. Pissantis took his WOKE educational rehabilitation campaign to a small, public university in Florida called The New School. It is a school that is a pure bastion of higher education, attracting some of the top students in the country to programs like economics, finance, social studies, medicine, and science. And being a public institution, it’s affordable.

Pissantis went to work on it. He stuffed the school’s board with cronies, and did an abrupt neanderthal turn on the curriculum. His hand picked board has adjusted the curriculum to remove basically any courses that have anything to do with critical thinking, race relations, or alternate lifestyles.

The result should have been predictable for anybody with 12 firing neurons. Not only did the New School students revolt, the revolt led to universities all over the state of Florida. There were mass walkouts on university campuses all over Florida, which garnered national media attention.

A cool, steely eyed, successful Governor shouldn’t be confronted by mass protests at almost every university in the state of Florida. Especially when many of the students are out of state students paying a premium price for their education. What’s the Governor doing wrong?

Fortunately, here comes the Florida state legislature to the rescue! They’ve introduced a new bill to the floor that would give the Governor the same dictatorial control over all of the universities in Florida that he rammed though at the New School. The bill proposes a new, what I’ll call a morals board appointed by the Governor that not only gives them complete control over the curriculum, but also gives them dictatorial control over the tenure of professors.

With friends like these, who needs enemas? Think about it for a minute. A state university isn’t just a bunch of buildings, it’s a complete economic ecosystem. Whole towns are centered around these universities, and make their living from the students spending money in the community. What happens if nobody wants to go to those universities because the state approved curriculum consists of nothing more than endless loops of Teletubbies episodes shown on the monitors?

This isn’t going anywhere. Led by the New School students and their parents, more mass protests are being scheduled. And because we’re talking about college kids, look for those protests to go nationwide. And it’s going to be covered by the national media, which is exactly what DeSantis doesn’t need. He’s trying to look calm, steely eyed, and successful, right?

This is the problem for the entire GOP 2024 presidential primary field in general, but especially for DeSantis. The GOP base has gone so far to the right that they need to create a new direction for it. That’s a fine line line that candidates like Haley, Pimpeo, and Pence can try to walk. They’re not empowered with anything right now. But when you’re a sitting Governor, trying to show your success, having mass protests in your state over your personal educational policies is not a way to attract soft GOP and independent voters. Stick a pin in this one. It’s going to explode.